Simone Veil, then health minister, addresses farmers at a protest in front of the European parliament in Strasbourg in 1980. Photograph: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty

The legislation, the Loi Veil (Veil law), is considered a cornerstone of women’s rights and secularism in France.

A staunch pro-European, Veil was elected to the European parliament in 1979, becoming the first president of the assembly. After a second term as health minister under the Socialist president François Mitterrand, Veil last held major public office between 1998 and 2007, when she was a member of the constitutional council.

The prime minister, Édouard Philippe, tweeted: “France has lost a figure the likes of which history produces few,.”

Born Simone Jacob in Nice, Veil was deported to the Nazi death camp at 17 with her entire family.

Her father and brother were last seen on a train to Lithuania and her mother, Yvonne, died in Belsen just before that camp was liberated in 1945.

Veil and her two sisters, one of whom later died in a car crash, were among only 11 survivors of 400 Jewish children deported from her region.

She later said it was her experiences in the Nazi concentration camps that made her a firm believer in the unification of Europe.

“Sixty years later I am still haunted by the images, the odours, the cries, the humiliation, the blows and the sky filled with the smoke of the crematoriums,” Veil said in a TV interview broadcast in 2005.